Group posted a joint statement that was echoed by their manager, announcing an upcoming ‘Abbatar’ tour and two new songs
ABBA have announced they are set to release new music for the first time in 35 years.
Posting a statement on the official ABBA Instagram account, the band wrote: “The decision to go ahead with the exciting ABBA avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence.
“We all four felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did. And it was like time had stood still and that we had only been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful experience!”
The statement continued: “It resulted in two new songs and one of them ‘I Still Have Faith In You’ will be performed by our digital selves in a TV special produced by NBC and the BBC aimed for broadcasting in December.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/abba-reunion-new-music-songs-sweden-group-release-uk-latest-news-a8325296.html
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Abba announce first new songs for 35 years
Swedish four-piece take to Instagram to announce two releases that will form part of an ‘avatar tour project’
Alexis Petridis: Abba’s return will be either genius or disaster – but nothing in between
‘I Still Have Faith In You’ - What do you think Abba’s new song will be like?
Abba have announced that they have written and recorded their first new songs since they split in 1983.
The Swedish four-piece, who had nine No 1 hits in the UK between 1974 and 1980, and who have sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide, announced on Instagram that they had recorded two new songs for a project in which avatars of the band will perform.
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Alexis Petridis
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The band said in a statement: “The decision to go ahead with the exciting Abba avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence. We all felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did. And it was like time had stood still and we had only been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful experience!”
One of the two new songs that resulted, called I Still Have Faith in You, will feature in a TV special to air in December.
The statement concluded: “We may have come of age, but the song is new. And it feels good.”
Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus revealed details of the band’s forthcoming project in Brussels earlier this week. The centrepiece is the two-hour TV show co-produced by NBC and the BBC, which will see the band perform as computer-generated avatars. Ulvaeus said the band had been digitally scanned and “de-aged” to look like they did in 1979, when they performed their third and final tour.
The avatars are then set to tour the world from next year.
Abba formed in Stockholm in 1972. They comprised two couples: Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog; and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, all of whom had enjoyed musical careers in Sweden. The group burst on to the international stage after winning the Eurovision song contest in Brighton in 1974 with their song Waterloo.
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From the mid-70s until they split, Abba built up a formidable arsenal of global hits including Knowing Me, Knowing You, Take a Chance on Me, Dancing Queen and The Name of the Game – all of which reached No 1 in the UK.
Fältskog and Lyngstad were the lead singers; Andersson and Ulvaeus composed the songs. Never less than impeccably produced and performed, Abba’s records were critically disdained at the time, but their popularity has endured. Their 1992 compilation Abba Gold has sold 30m copies – more than 5m of those in the Britain – and .
Their jukebox musical Mamma Mia! debuted in the West End in 1999 and is still running both in London and worldwide; its website claims that it has been seen by 60 million people in 440 cities.
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The stage show was adapted into a film in 2008, which grossed $615m (£447m) worldwide. A sequel, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, will be released in June. The actor Lily James – who is set to appear alongside the cast of the first film including Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried and Colin Firth – : “There’s lot of songs in there, lots of new ones. Lots of ones, actually, that weren’t in my repertoire of Abba and I think they’re going to be huge hits again, and reawaken the love of Abba.”
Abba’s split in 1983 followed the divorces of both couples. Ulvaeus and Andersson went on to write two musicals, including Chess – a revival by the English National Opera opens on Friday in London – before largely devoting themselves to Abba’s legacy. Fältskog and Lyngstad have kept much lower profiles, though Fältskog – long claimed to be a recluse – returned to pop music with an album, A, which was released in 2013.
The group have long held out against lucrative offers to reform – they were reported to have been offered $1bn to play a concert in 2000. In 2014, Ulvaeus told Billboard: “you will never see us on stage again … we don’t need the money, for one thing.”
Peter Robinson, editor of Popjustice, described the announcement as “the biggest pop news of the 21st century. Most fans grudgingly admired Abba’s refusal to record new music, but I think we all sometimes daydreamed about the band possibly, maybe, one day having a rethink at the right time, on the right terms and for the right reasons, which seems to be what’s happened here.” He added: “It’s a pop miracle.”
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-announce-first-new-songs-for-35-years
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ABBA to release first new material in 35 years
By Michael Idato27 April 2018 — 10:35pm
It may be incorrect to say that the Swedish supergroup ABBA have got back together; for many years they took great pain to point out that they had never formally broken up.
And yet news that they have reformed to record two new songs has been greeted around the world like the second coming, albeit one seasoned in blue eyeshadow and a little bit of glitter.
ABBA will release new material for the first time in 35 years.
ABBA will release new material for the first time in 35 years.
Photo: AP
The four members of the group - Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad - have announced they have recorded two new songs.
The first is titled I Still Have Faith in You, and will be released in November as part of an already announced digital concert television project in which computer-generated "Abbatars" of the group will perform with a live band.
The second is still unknown.
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"The decision to go ahead with the exciting ABBA avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence," a statement from the group said.
"We all four felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did."
The group described the experience as "extremely joyous".
"It was like time had stood still and that we had only been away on a short holiday. We may have come of age, but the song is new and it feels good."
Though they are one of the most successful groups in the history of pop music, there has always been something very simple and organic about their process.
Ulvaeus and Andersson famously wrote the group's best music in a little cottage on an island in the Swedish archipelago and, despite the musical complexity of the songs, did not put music notation to paper.
Benny and Frida were the first off the plane to wave to fans at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport in 1977.
Benny and Frida were the first off the plane to wave to fans at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport in 1977.
Photo: The Age
They also famously experimented in the studio, recording the same song in several styles, and sometimes with different lyrics, until they were happy with a final version.
The timing of the announcement cannot be discounted - a week ahead of the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon, Portugal. ABBA's big break came at 1974's Eurovision, at The Dome, in Brighton, in the UK, when they sang one of their biggest hits, Waterloo.
What followed was stunning, transforming them into a worldwide phenomenon, as hit piled on hit: Mamma Mia, Fernando, SOS, Dancing Queen, Chiquitita and more. As with success came Money, Money, Money.
The recipe was curiously European but nonetheless infectious: the gentle flirtation between the couples - Fältskog and Ulvaeus, Lyngstad and Andersson - the often eccentric wardrobe, the easily mimicked choreography. And those tearaway cat dresses, oh my.
For eight years they topped the charts, and then came divorce, tension and, ultimately, dissolution.
Though it was never an explicit part of their songwriting style, ABBA's most complex songs did seem to bring an echo of their real-world experience into their music.
Slipping Through My Fingers came straight from Bjorn and Agnetha's heartbreak as their daughter Linda grew up. I'm a Marionette talked to the exhaustion of their touring fame, and of course The Winner Takes It All as their marriages - and the band - began to disintegrate.
They group last appeared together - formally, as ABBA - on Britain's The Late, Late Breakfast Show on December 11, 1982.
The rebirth of the band - if they ever truly went away - was kicked off in the 1990s with the release of ABBA Gold in 1992, and two Australian films in 1994, Muriel's Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Fitting perhaps, as Australia had been one of the first coutries outside Europe to embrace them.
And then Mamma Mia, the monstrous Broadway hit, which places a collection of their songs into the loose framework of a Greek romantic comedy, came in 1999; the appearance of all four members of ABBA at the 2008 Swedish premiere of the musical was properly historic.
A film version came out in 2008, and a sequel is due later this year.
The question of whether they would ever reform is more complex. For many years all four were adamant they would not. Though Ulvaeus and Andersson continued working together, Fältskog and Lyngstad had moved on.
Former ABBA members Bjorn Ulvaeus, left, and Benny Andersson with actress Catherine Johnson at a performance of the musical Mamma Mia! in London.
Former ABBA members Bjorn Ulvaeus, left, and Benny Andersson with actress Catherine Johnson at a performance of the musical Mamma Mia! in London.
Photo: AP
"I think we have to accept that it will not happen, because we are too old and each one of us has their own life," Fältskog, by a noticeable measure the most reclusive of the four, said in 2013. "Too many years have gone by since we stopped and there's really no meaning in putting us together again."
And then a year later, she said: "As long as we can sing and play, then why not? I would love to, but it's up to Björn and Benny."
Though The Way Old Friends Do was not their last recorded song, it seems now to sit in their own musical history, a curious pivot between the group's original repertoire and this strange moment of historic reconnection.
After fights and words of violence / we make up with each other / the way old friends do, it goes. Times of joy and times of sorrow / we will always see it through / I don't care what comes tomorrow / we can face it together, the way old friends do.
It makes the choice of title for their first new release in 35 years all the more signficant: I Still Have Faith in You.
As their fans always, unwaveringly, had in them.
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/abba-to-release-first-new-material-in-35-years-20180427-p4zc5s.html
